The grizzled cove came into town under his chimney hat. In those days, the purveyors of queer medicine rode ramshackle wagons swaying from side to side, ill-balanced between large leaning wheels, hauled by horses as small as mules. Horses that looked like giant rats from certain angles. Even...

Based on last night’s speed-writing exercise at the Clacton writer’s group...
The crew of them came for me. They somehow told me that their on-going job was to cast a net for everyone who was celebrating their 70th Birthday. I looked them straight in the empty eye sockets and asked...

Black and right, black and right,
Back to night, back to night,
Empty well on the left, coloured in light.
What did he say? Sounded like lines from nonsense nursery rhyme verse. But does a nursery give out sounds like nonsense? Quite easily, she replied. When a nursery full of...

The Maroon Party
A maroon-party is a picnic over several days, rather than the more usual single occasion spanning, say, a single afternoon. Old Dick had arranged this particular shindig for no obvious purpose: with several stellified ladies, buckets of sloshing trash-ice,...

I walked across the plain, looking to neither side, interminably, doggedly, as if this were a real desert ahead of me, not just something that simply looked like one, thirst being the main driving force, even though I did not feel thirsty at all. Not even a little bit.
They had let me out...

Last night’s speed-writing exercise at the Writer’s Group as based on a randomly chosen title...
................
THE LIFEBOAT
Tell me, who called the lifeboat?
I visualised a surging sea with a shape that upped and downed within it. Not a whale or shark, but something...

“The Atlantic is disarmingly called the Pond, where Tentacles born in America can often reach our shores in Britain, or if not Tentacles, at least a ripple or two carrying what many consider to be the infections of a planet’s soul that first find root on the other side of the so-called...

In the 1950s, I read a book as a child that I had by now forgotten; it came back to me gradually, not in one fell swoop. A library book, you know the sort: plain weathered beige mottled hardboard covers with a little thin cardboard pocket stuck inside and a piece of paper also stuck with a...

Nearly next Christmas. The small child in its pushchair. The bars of the pushchair’s frame hung with small bells that the traffic deafened. Bells that were once Christmas decorations. Evidently they had been painted blue, it now being long since Christmas when most decorative bells were silver...

I must tell someone. There were telltale signs on her body – the handprint-shaped bruises around the rib cage, the mouth, at that time still full of two tongues. Hers and someone else’s. She had evidently died during the act of lovemaking.
In all, the body showed evidence of a...

“When you are born, life is mapped out for you. Unless, of course, things change, even very small things changing, just one small thing being able to alter the course of your whole lifetime, and the whole world’s course will alter, too, alongside and as a result of your own one small change,...

Chopin wrote 24 Preludes, one for each hour of the day, but I always played them when there was a full moon. There was something plaintive about them, methodical, as if all was right, bright or even rightly, brightly dark about the world. When there was a misty ghostly moon of any size, I...

The plane was readying itself for take-off.
I wondered if a plane was called a plane because it interleaved several planes of reality and dream in order to achieve flight for a heavier-than-air object that it surely was. A transporter for people across the tightening borders of the...

"I wonder if a black oyster can culture a black pearl, its pitch black outer shell hinged to another such shell, and tightly contained within them are its slimy innards and a now bullet-hard pellet shaped into a tiny sphere whereupon all the seas and lands mapped upon it are as black as...

SHIFTING SHADOWS
"We'll need a belt as well as some braces," she said.
I looked askance at where my wife Rose was sitting. What did she know about a man's need for a belt and braces? Sixty years of marriage and she still thought that anxiety was a word you set in spelling tests....

Belts & Braces.
Two words in the title tied together by an ampersand. Two words are always better than one. One no doubt better than none. But three or more? That's when you get close to renting a crowd, I guess. Belt, braces, buttons & buckles. Brooches and badges then added, closely...

I needed a new circuit in my house. Oh, by the way, my name is Francis, spelt in the male way - 'is' not 'es'. I requisitioned, therefore, a specialist electrician as the circuit had lost the efficiency of its ohm resistor and thus required a new connection. I loved connections, even...

He placed an empty plate in front of me.
"There's a time and a plate," he said, as if this were the best joke in the world.
I laughed politely. Polite laughter is never the same as real laughter. But it was real enough to elicit a small breaking of wind.
He left for the...